Last Updated on November 28, 2022, 8:30 AM | Published: November 23, 2022
OKLAHOMA CITY — Each year, the Homeless Alliance Westtown campus in OKC hosts the most wonderful meal of the year on the day before Thanksgiving.
Bringing together some of our best city restaurants, enthusiastic volunteers, and the invaluable crew of the Homeless Alliance itself, the city’s underprivileged are invited to enjoy a hearty, delicious, restaurant-caliber feast to celebrate the holiday without interfering with the many other meal options available on Thanksgiving Day (listed below.)
But this year, it’s not just the grateful guests enjoying the food that have reason to celebrate.
Record funding
Yesterday (Tuesday, November 22nd,) hot on the heels of the OKC City Council agreeing to drop a series of controversial anti-homeless policing ordinances due to public outcry, the Homeless Alliance had even more good news to share.
The organization has been named as a recipient of $2.5 million in grants through Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos’s Day 1 Families Fund, a philanthropic funding project designed to provide major grants to non-profits throughout the country that are addressing homelessness, particularly facing families.
It is the largest private gift focused on families in the organization’s history.
The funding – which will amount to roughly half a million extra dollars for the Homeless Alliance each year for the next five years – is set to be used to bolster and reinforce a number of the Alliance’s existing programs.
“What this will enable us to do is put more of our ‘housing navigators’ out at those agencies that serve families with children,” Straughan explained. “Those are people that work with our clients to figure out what the barriers are to housing and to ultimately help them find housing.”
Housing help
The main goal of the Homeless Alliance is to find and secure housing for their “clients,” people that come to them for the help and services they provide.
Of these clients, the top priorities are, unsurprisingly, children.
“Oklahoma City has some really great shelters,” Straughan told me. “But the truth of the matter is that a homeless shelter is just not an appropriate place for a child.”
The Alliance’s efforts to house and help city children have been paying off over the last year. While the Wednesday meal was packed and busy as ever, and while guests and clients were laughing, eating, and enjoying themselves greatly, there were noticeably fewer children in attendance than last year.
The Alliance hopes that is an indication that fewer children are currently numbering among the city’s struggling unhoused population.
“A day shelter can be intimidating even for adults,” said Kinsey Crocker, Communications Director for the Homeless Alliance. “So anytime a family with children comes here, we’re trying to divert them to housing or something smaller and less intimidating than this.”
Getting Back to Normal
Some of that intimidation and difficulty is finally being calmed, though.
After strict COVID-concern protocols involving masks, distancing, and to-go meals intended to be enjoyed outside throughout 2020 and 2021, guests this year were finally able to happily sit inside the day shelter’s main space and enjoy the meal at tables surrounded by family and friends.
“It’s nice to be getting back to some semblance of normal,” said Crocker, even while acknowledging that the number of guests on a day like today is anything but normal. “It’s hard to say what our numbers will be today, but I expect we’ll see a definite spike compared to what we see on a normal day.”
The Alliance’s day shelter can see upwards of 200 people every day, even on average, non-holiday days, and with housing hurdles such as eviction increases and the growing difficulty of finding housing voucher-accepting landlords, the number of people needing the help and services the Alliance provides is steadily rising.
“Especially at the end of the month, we always see numbers go up,” Crocker explained. “People get their Social Security checks at the beginning of the month, and oftentimes they get hotels or are able to go buy food. And then at the end of the month, that money runs out. So we always see a spike towards the end of the month.”
‘The most important thing’
Luckily, the rest of this month will see plenty of available help and plenty of great food.
Much like we all do after our own Thanksgiving feasts, the shelter tends to take leftovers from the big meal and turn them into mouth-watering sandwiches, casseroles, and more for the rest of November, an exciting prospect to Alliance clients that get particularly excited about these holiday dishes.
Clients like Tony, who was enjoying the meal today in celebration of having finally found housing through the Alliance.
And like Aton, who told me that sweet potatoes were his absolute favorite for the holidays, and who has some lofty dreams and ambitions about how he’d like to give back to the community that has lent him a hand.
“I’d like to clean up the world,” he told me. “God created the world, and all this happened under his supervision, so that’s the most important thing.”
Thanksgiving Day Meals in the OKC Metro
Salvation Army OKC
11:00am to 1:00pm
1001 N. Pennsylvania Ave., OKC
City Rescue Mission OKC
12:00pm to 1:30pm
800 W. California Ave., OKC
City Center
11:00am to 2:00pm
5731 NW 41st St., Warr Acres
Kaiser’s Café
11:00am to 1:00pm
1039 N. Walker, OKC
Church of the Open Arms
1:00pm to 2:00pm
3131 N. Pennsylvania Ave., OKC
Norman Food & Shelter
11:00am to 1:00pm
Norman High School Cafeteria
911 W. Main St., Norman
Edmond Community Thanksgiving Dinner
Offering drive-thru pick-up meals
11:00am to 1:00pm
UCO George Nigh University Center
100 N. University Drive, Edmond
Eastside Church of Christ
11:00am to 2:00pm
916 S. Douglas, Midwest City
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
